April 19, 2003

BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter

Among the archeologically irreplaceable items feared stolen or destroyed is a 2,700-year-old stone relief from the grand palace of King Sargon II, the Assyrian leader who ruled in what is now northern Iraq from 722 to 705 B.C. Also potentially missing are 4,500-year-old, 2-1/2-foot-tall statues from the temple of the god Abu in central Iraq. The wealthy of antiquity thought the statues helped them communicate with the deity.

"It's like the Garden of Eden was trampled on,'' said Clemens Reichel, a research associate at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, of the looting that took place at the National Museum in Baghdad after the United States military took over the city.

Those items were among thousands excavated by the U. of C. over the past century and sent to the National Museum. The fear that the artifacts are now gone has driven U. of C. researchers and students to launch a desperate attempt to recreate the inventory of the National Museum.

Officials at the Oriental Institute and the school's anthropology department held a "crisis meeting'' Friday to discuss the creation of an online database that will eventually include thousands of digital images of items believed to have been in the National Museum's collection.

A link to the database is at www.oi.uchicago.edu, the institute's Web site. It will eventually include the status of the artifacts--whether they are missing, destroyed, recovered or unknown. It will be updated regularly so art collectors and others can determine if something they come across has been stolen.

"We are going to do everything we can possibly do to hinder the flow of this art out of Iraq and into the art market,'' said Nicholas Kouchoukos, an assistant professor of anthropology who has studied the museum's collection. "If an object appears on our page and it's not in Iraq, it can be assumed it was stolen or looted.''

No one knows for sure how many items were stolen, nor does anyone know the size of the museum's collection, but some estimates suggest the collection could include 170,000 or more items.

Many of the items are well known to researchers at the U. of C., which has conducted several excavations in Iraq dating to the 1920s. That includes the city of Nippur, a sacred Sumerian site in southern Iraq with items dating to 3000 B.C. It also includes four sites in the Diyala region in central Iraq in the heart of Mesopotamia.

Early antiquities laws required sending half the items dug up to Baghdad, while half went to the Oriental Institute; in the 1970s, the law required keeping everything in Iraq.

The U. of C. kept detailed records of everything excavated, including black and white photos of varying quality from earlier digs and color shots more recently. But Reichel had hoped to visit Baghdad to take new photos of the items from the Diyala project, which includes 17,000 items in Baghdad and Chicago.

Still, the university is putting everything it has online, and is soliciting photos from around the world. Working almost around the clock this week, graduate students have scanned some 1,500 photos from the institute's archives, books and elsewhere.

"This is so important because it's not just Iraq's heritage, it's the world's heritage,'' Reichel said.